I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

http://www.akc.org/images/breeds/pekingese/photos/lg_pekingese1.jpg

Miscellaneous Notes for Girl Crush 2005 Project:
(copied from notebook, largely uneditted)
SPOILERS! SUPER NERDS TURN BACK NOW!

-Little Girl Inventor, hun that shoots ponies

- Deaf Swordsman (Assassin) who is lonely. Has no friends… Tries to make friends with his targets before he kills them. (Reference – Zatoichi)
“Sometimes chance encounters lead to the best friendships” – Seven Samurai

- Old Ninja Master Retiree (Reference – Ninja Scroll), Only got into ninjitsu to get out of the house, urged by wife to get a hobby. Hangs out at Ninja Master social club. Has terrible gambling problem, debts. Only wants Pinku to collect treasures so he can pawn them.

– Wacky dude (monk) with brain tumor. – Nerd Mecha/Otaku Mech – Magic Using Mystic

-Intense female Ninja (Kunoichi) – Takane

– Bandit King, seen it all

-Cat Samurai, effete, superior nobleman

– Robot… “Chii” type

-Creepy child

Cross-dressing

Old lady as narrator

Gay Twisted Angel, cape over gakuran

battle inside and outside house with shoe removal

Flute as weapon (mind control) musical magic

The Singing Shogun
Every scene the Shogun is killed by a different person, at the end he reveals he has 5 identical brothers (and bearded sister) who he manipulated everyone into killing—no rivals.

The giant Mecha “Ro-Buddha” who the Deaf Sword has access to “But it can only be piloted by true friends.” All of our heroes leave to pilot the mech without Deaf Sword, who goes shopping/home instead. Action scenes of team flying mech contrasted with Deaf Sword doing boring things.—RoBuddha is disguised as statue of Buddha in shogun’s palace.

Baku transforms into white sword (with Baku face) for giant robot. Shogun becomes huge-sized and battles RoBuddha.

Shadowy figures give exposition/orders to Deaf Sword who faces out (does kata).... after orders “What? Did you say something”

Deaf Sword disguised as travelling monk. Magical powers? Magic tricks.

Chinese Dragon-lady type (British accent) who shoots (Pekingese) out of sleeves, stinky tofu breath
Dogshooting woman attacks Cat-Samurai “It’s my nightmare come true… and by that I mean a powerful woman as I am a misogynist”

Cat Samurai vs. Deaf Sword – Nyakomaru gives long speech of his skills including “You will rub my belly and when I have lured you, I will bite you for no reason,” but Deaf can’t hear… he doesn’t move his lips enough. – Tassle on Deaf’s spear/pole distracts Nyakomaru, Deaf puts on hat later to also distract him. – Nyakomaru knocks monk’s pole in half, revealing blade “Oh yeah, I’m an assassin. But I’m also a magician… check this out” Deaf makes flowers appear.
-Deaf guy does killer move, Nyako thinks he’s dying, writes “death poem”

(Two characters in love with Sakura)
A traitor. Second School Girl?

-sitting in the corner in shame
-rolling on the floor in excitement

Expressionistic effects for battle – cloud of falling feathers, flock of doves on wires
Rolling Platform…

Upon a deathbed, “I’m glad to have met you”

Starting from Episode 5… narration brings us up to date on Sakura Pinku through portal, meeting Baku and Old Man. Cursed magic sword.

Sword of Destiny isn’t really all that good. Doesn’t hurt anyone… easily defeated. In last scene, kills Shogun

Giant Robot Costume

The Advertising Slogan Generator

The UCB site is changing, slowly.

Chad asked me to do a “header” for Girl Crush last year, and I think it was the only show with a header for that whole year. I remember it being a lot long and narrower than this. As you can see, it was rushed off in an hour without really any concept behind it. We didn’t have the manga art or the photographs yet.

A day after being told Instant Cinema was getting its slot chopped down to 30 minutes, the office asked for another “header.” I was in no mood to do it, so I got around to it today. It kicks off a big chunk of IC design work which has been on the burner for the last three months—slide show and website being next.

Different cast members have commented on the old Feature site art, which was Shag-esque. (Pointed rip off really, but no one outside Surf- and Bachelor Pad music afficiandos had seen Shag back then.) I tried to do something more mid-century minimal (aka ripping off Flora instead of Shag) with my first header attempt, but it came out really blah (and the type is hideous)—

—the camera took 3 hours alone.

Just for the sake of getting something up, I chopped up the flyer and made this one.

Looks stretched. Since there wasn’t room to have any cast member’s faces in it, I made a point to only show awkward cut-off glimpses of body parts that have no indication of indentity. I plan on redoing this as soon as I take care of the other IC stuff.

Some of my books finally came that my parents ordered from Amazon for Xmas. Two were still missing I think but I have, in addition to two chapters of Kare Kano, The Mischievious Art of Jim Flora and Rian Hughes: Device/ File Under Art, Commercial.

I also uploaded four pieces to my design site that have been sitting around for awhile.

Just finished.

I want to draw more but I think my drawing skills haven’t improved in like ten years. This looks so rough to me. True, I didn’t plan out this one before I did it. The original drawing was the two figures side-by-side with their fists out, wearing rings that spelled out CRACKAZ, but I didn’t like how it looked. So this was cut and pasted into this. And they’re just standing there. And the composition is pretty weak.

I surf a lot of amateur art and comics sites online, and people—kids—are doing amazing things. Just amazing draftsmen. Even if I don’t like the style (99% are Manga-esque) or the topic (RPG fantasy) the skills around are tops.

I should suck it up and just do a comic.

Will Hines, my guru on all things related to ambivalence and frusteration, commented once that his really super-talented friends never accomplished anything while his medium-talented but organized and ambitious friends achieved success. I can be organized about small things, but I have very little ambition. He’s suggesting I do like Joe Matt and start out with a diary comic, but as this blog will attest, I don’t really do much.

WillieBHines: hmph
WillieBHines: all joe matt talked about was how much he hated ceratin people
WillieBHines: his need for porn
WillieBHines: and his inability to produce material
hannahgeetsromo: I don’t even have a humorous obsession with porn

My 502 Class starts tonight.

Finished the Go Metric cover over the weekend, but Faloon emailed me to say the SCTV DVD set review was scrapped so I had to change the line up. Good thing I didn’t put any more time than I did with my elaborate SCTV-themed cartoon illustration. Still, I think I kinda bailed on what could have been a cool cover.

Kirk brought over the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monsterous Manual since I mentioned I liked the image of the leaping horse in the “Horse” entry. (I looked high and low for a rearing horse for the Monkeydick card back in November and low, the exact pose I wanted was in this damned nerd book). I’ve been leafing through it for the last couple days and marveling at how shitty the art is. Most of it anyway. It doesn’t even match the descriptions most of the time. I particularly like the awkwardly Marvel-ized Babylonian monsters with bearded human heads. I’d love to do a one-frame animation of these monsters in conversation, a la My Dinner with Andre. The Go Metric cover model is the Manticore, who seems to be bellowing “Who ate all my damn Fiddlefaddle!”

I did the back cover of Cracked Out’s CD today. I’m getting fussy about my cover illustration. They’re really impatient and want it ASAP, so I might just use what I did already. My Illustrator style doesn’t really read hip hop—especially intentionally low brow, scatalogical hip hop—so I’m drawing it with a pen and airbrushing the hell out of it in Photoshop.
One of my unstated New Years Resolutions was to do more drawings, so this will be one step in that direction. I watched Wing Chun while I ate my chicken and stringbeans in ginger sauce. Another unstated New Years Resolution was to not order food delivered and I’ve danced over that one three times over this year. It is sleeting and cold outside and I don’t have any food here otherwise, so I felt it had to be done, but guilty none the less.

I had another vivid weird dream but as I was phasing into consiousness I was rewriting my dream into a screenplay (which has happened a couple of times now; my dream state is a lot more prolific a writer than my waking state)—a contemporary update of the Goonies about kids at a nerd camp set at a mysterious university and the tunnels there-under.

The straight-up dream part was me and a gang of friends exploring the Civil Defense tunnels under a college but the engineer of the tunnels had put all these weird control panels into the walls that were arcanely labeled. Earlier we had been tubin’ in inflatable rafts so I think we were trying to flood the tunnels or open a dam somewhere so we could keep tubin’. We fiddled with the switches and managed to get some water in but another switch made the floor rise unsettlingly and another switch gave one of my friends a dappy haircut (Since the panel was installed by some turn of the century tinkerer he ended up with a greasy coif of the day). There were a lot of other kids and cliques of kids in the tunnels so our tubin’ and panel-fiddlin’ had caused all kinds of other slapstick incidents to occur, but those are all gone in my memory.

As I was rewriting this into a screenplay on one level of consciousness, the dream-narritive continued with me riding a bus away from summer camp through Los Angeles, passing big studios and on the exterior of one (presumably WB’s) they had a huge multi-layered display for Jackie Chan Adventures which was supposed to look like a street scene from the show with all the items drawn on plywood flats.

My dream scripted a fake-out cold opening with a scene from some 80s slasher flick taking place at summer camp (and I cleverly dream-scripted the slasher in the clip to be a fireman referring to last week’s Instant Cinema, what a wag). The camera pulls out from the summer camp slasher scene to a professor analyzing the scene for its symbolism and its place in the feminist dialog and bla bla college intellectual masturbation and the scene reverse angles to 12 pre-adolescent kids in the lecture hall dressed in baseball hats and shorts (we didn’t wear baseball hats in lecture, but it’s a dream).

When I was fully awake I realized no studio on earth would possibly make this movie. I could rewrite it as a kids movie, I guess, which Goonies was, but nerdy kid heros in a period 1991 setting… unlikely.

I started yesterday on my first new projects of 2005 (that aren’t nagging, never-ending projects like the ghastly Housing Works invitation that won’t die or my ever procrastinated Go Metric cover freebie commission)—
1. Cracked Out, “Crackaz” CD cover
2. JimFloraArt.com website
—-

This is my progress so far. I don’t really “do” hip-hop style. I hate graffiti art. I did a massive search online for graffiti fonts (this site had the motherlode – DaFONT) and found a treasure trove. This is BV ‘DeGrassi’ which I fiddled with to make it less fonty. I overlapped all the letters by making the space between them -150 to -250 and then erased the errant lines. It’s a mix of capital (with arrows) and lowercase, some are different point sizes and a few are dropped down -5 points. I made the font a bitmap and then airbrushed the color inside (there’s some weird jaggy bits in “OUT” that need to be done over). Put a white line around the whole thing and added the drips.

I have to do some kind of figures to round out the cover and also the title treatment for “Crackas” (or “Crakaz” depending who you’re talking to). But I’ve got a couple days yet (and have to finish Go Metric first)

JimFloraArt.com….

A couple days ago I had an elaborate and horrible dream that had many “scenes,” but the one I remember best was a large wedding-reception-type dinner and a huge group of cater-waiters bolting into the place at once. One of them was clearly George Lucas and another was Rob Corddry in disguise. He was wearing a tight-perm wig and fake mustache (which is a “disguise” once worn by that goofy dude who does the live action segment on Cyberchase… the “Sleazy Off” courtcase).

I recognized Rob and said “What are you doing here!”

He rolled his eyes and said, “It’s all George Lucas’ idea. He really wanted to pretend we were cater waiters and I had to humor him since we’re doing a movie together, but people always recognize me more than him so I had to wear a disguise.”

I remembered suddenly I had earlier become obsessed with a “great idea” for a movie that would be shot like Slacker but be an action-SciFi movie about a constantly evolving city-planet that was a stacked sequence of terraced environments. You’d be in a city, turn a corner and you’re on a mountain, turn a corner and you’re under the sea. I thought about telling this idea to Rob, but thought better of it and wandered off from the formal dinner to the 100th anniversary of the Wheel Circus.

It was in an adjacent room, a full-sized red-and-yellow big top on wheels and the signs and banners all advertised it was an American institution on hard times and we should remember what it meant to us back then and support it now. The Circus-on-Wheels also functioned as a movie theater and as I looked in, they were showing a black-and-white movie, about a circus.

Somewhere around here I woke up.

Last night I had a more chilling, but less circular dream. I had robbed a bank with Jackie Clarke, both of us dressed as our Girl Crush characters. This had already happened when the dream started and I had hidden the money in a vacuum-packed plastic bag inside the springs of one of my parents’ sofas. I knew they were moving soon so they could blindly transport the stolen money out of the state for me. But I was overwhelmed with guilt. I couldn’t do anything with Girl Crush since we had committed out crimes in character and worse, would probably be traced because of the website. I could give it up, but I’d still have to go to jail. I couldn’t spend any of the money. I could tell my parents, but they might turn me in. I didn’t even remember why I stole the money in the first place. I woke up feeling very upset.

Will Hines made me this blog, after we talked about it for quite some time. It’s ugly right now and I’m only just figuring out how to make it less so, and also more functional.

I particularly dislike the enormous graphic up top that says “my babblings!” This stock graphic is demeaning my future entries.